


Before You Start Your Day

by flashlightserenade



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: I have no idea where this is going, I'm very sorry, M/M, i'll add more characters and tags and stuff later, it's my first fic sorry, josh is generally annoyed, joshler - Freeform, sorry - Freeform, spoiled tyler, the joshler fic that No One Asked For, this is the worst, um horses basically?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 18:17:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6621217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashlightserenade/pseuds/flashlightserenade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Tyler's a spoiled kid with a horse and Josh works at the barn where Tyler boards his horse</p>
            </blockquote>





	Before You Start Your Day

**Author's Note:**

> this is my first fic that i've actually posted and i'm really very sorry i have no idea where it's going and it's the middle of the night. maybe i'll finish it. probably not. sorry.

Josh was finally getting used to his new life. Every morning he woke up at five, trudged down the ladder, and made himself some breakfast in his boss’ office. Then he picked up a bunch of buckets and carried them out the double doors to where the horses were pacing anxiously in their stalls. He said hello to each one as he dumped the buckets into each stall, loaded the back of the truck with hay, and threw out a bale or so to each paddock. He drove the truck back up to the barn, and he brought all the horses out in twos and threes and the occasional individual, peeled off their blankets, and let them out in their paddocks. Again, he went back inside, he made up the grain for the following morning, and then he set himself to work cleaning out all 26 stalls. That process usually took him the entire morning.

Josh hadn’t always submitted himself to such monotonous, undignified labor. Back in his carefree teen years he was kind of a punk, and the most menial job he’d had before this one was a waiter at Steak n Shake. Then his mom was diagnosed with cancer, and he had to find a way to pay the hospital bills. Sure, he worked so much he could never even visit her, he actually lived at the horse barn, but every month he sent a check to the hospital and they did what they could to make her comfortable.

He was wheeling into the tenth stall of the morning when he heard a heavy vehicle pull up, obviously dragging something even heavier behind it. “Oh, no,” Josh said to himself. “Now it’s twenty-seven stalls.” He leaned his pitchfork against the wall and went to greet whoever had just come in, as was Drake River Farm policy.

A boy about Josh’s age jumped out of the truck and said, “Hi, I’m Tyler Joseph. Can I speak with the owner?” His clothes were clean and Josh immediately hated him. He just, he seemed arrogant, and Josh could already tell he was loaded, and what kind of name was Tyler Joseph, anyway? That was, like, two first names.

“She’s usually not down here for another couple hours,” Josh said. “Have you called her?”

The Tyler Joseph boy looked horrified, as though the prospect of other people not immediately serving his needs was completely unheard of. Granted, judging by the thread count of his shirt, it probably was.

Josh, trying to be helpful and not seem annoyed over having been disrupted from his routine, asked, “I mean, did you have a time set to meet her?” The guy nodded, so Josh tried, “Is that time now?” He nodded again. “I’m sure she’ll be down in a minute,” Josh promised, then, because his boss was pretty notorious for being late. He wasn’t going to say that, of course. Josh was almost thirty. He knew how to be professional. “You can hang out while you wait? I can show you around, if you’d like.” He had better things to do, like clean the other sixteen stalls, but Josh was doing what he was supposed to do.

Tyler Joseph said, “I guess,” and Josh finally remembered to tell him his name, and he showed off only the clean parts of the barn. Then they went out and he introduced all the horses by name and of course he gave them all peppermints and chin scratches, which Tyler thought was dumb, and by the time they’d said hello to all twenty-six of them Lynn was walking over from the house, wearing her nicest Drake River Farm shirt and a cream-colored pair of britches.

She gave a weak, but apologetic excuse for her lateness and told Josh to get back to work, then she and Tyler unloaded a tall, muscular, gleaming black horse from the trailer. Josh really hoped he wasn’t expected to keep that clean, too. The horse went into a paddock by himself, and Josh threw him a bale of hay, then folded his blankets over the door to the stall he’d be in and wrote what they were to feed him on the chart in the grain room. Josh then grabbed another grain bucket from his loft and wrote “WISPY” with the red marker across the side. Once Tyler Joseph was confident that Golden Whisper was properly settled in and safe and happy he got back in his truck and left.

Lynn helped Josh with the stalls, since the Tyler Joseph endeavor had set them far behind, and she explained that he was a world-class hunter-jumper and that Josh was to let Tyler Joseph bully him as much as he pleased as long as he was still paying the farm’s electric bill.

When Josh and Lynn finished mucking stalls, Josh jumped on the four-wheeler and quickly dragged all of the sand in the indoor and outdoor rings into pretty patterns and Lynn lectured a couple of thirteen year old girls about posting diagonals and trot poles. Josh fed out lunch hay and he gave some of the horses some grain, then he took a leaf blower and cleared out the entire barn, holed himself back up in the office, and ate some lunch.

After lunch Josh looked at the list Lynn had left him and in groups of two and three he brought the horses on that list into the indoor ring and worked them.

Josh didn’t ride. Sure, sometimes Hayley or Pete could convince him to climb on King, appropriately nicknamed for his venerable position as the oldest and gentlest horse at DRF, and let them lead him around a couple times. He was honestly terrified of riding. He hated everything about it. He was only there for the money to send to his mom and he’d already gotten far too entangled in the business.

When all the horses had been lunged, Josh brought all the horses back in, gave them their dinner grain, blanketed those that he was supposed to blanket, cleaned everything he hadn’t yet cleaned, made sure everything was ready for the next morning, fed himself dinner, quickly washed himself in the shower that was in the bathroom off the tack room, climbed the ladder to the hayloft, and went to sleep.

He woke up the next morning at five and repeated the process, only Tyler Joseph did not make another reappearance for at least nine days.

**Author's Note:**

> idk if you don't know anything about horses this probably doesn't make any sense at all. it barely makes any sense to me honestly  
> tell me if it was okay i guess?  
> i'm really very sorry


End file.
